Cheryl had just made a mistake.
“Where did you go after?” I asked.
“Home.” Cheryl sighed. “It’s difficult for me to admit, but despite our best efforts, the Pit Reclamation Project stalled. It causes me a great deal of anxiety.”
“We all have those projects,” Alessandro said.
She acknowledged him with a grateful glance. For a moment they were alone in a room, two wealthy entrepreneurs sharing an understanding of difficulties with running a business. Something pinched me and I realized it was jealousy. I buried it.
“You’ve seen the front room of this office,” Cheryl continued. “The name of our House is synonymous with reliability. We are problem solvers. I will solve the problem of the Pit, but the solution to it demands every ounce of my attention. After a full day of concentrating at the workshop, I can barely put two words together. Gloria was too kind not to mention it during our dinner, but I’m sure I looked like death warmed over and likely sounded the same. I barely got home, fell asleep, and woke up around nine, because my son became concerned that my back would hurt from sleeping on the couch.”
She was giving a lot of detail.
“Your dedication is commendable,” Alessandro said. He sounded impressed.
“I do what I can.”
Modesty, Cheryl, is your middle name.
“This matter doesn’t just concern me,” she said. “It concerns our family legacy.”
“What was the nature of the construct you released into the Pit?”
The helpful expression on Cheryl’s face gained a slightly injured quality, as if I had insulted her, but she was too good to acknowledge it. “It was an experimental model under the working name Kraken. It’s designed to assess its environment and eliminate biological threats.”
“Marat mentioned that you lost control of the Kraken.” I had chosen my words very carefully.
Cheryl leaned forward, but her voice remained gentle, patient, and bordering on patronizing.
“No, I lost contact with the construct. I assure you, none of my creations have ever escaped my control.”
There it was, a featherlight touch from Rahul. He was a dual—not just a shrieker, but also a telepath, probably a lower Significant in both. The duality made him dangerous. He was trying to pick up my surface thoughts. Cheryl had just breached protocol. Scanning another mage’s mind was grounds for retaliation. It was like being groped by a stranger.
I sent my magic out. It grew from me, its tendrils twisting like grapevine shoots, subtle, barely detectable, winding around Rahul.
“So where is the construct now?” I asked.
“Lost to the Pit.”
“How big was it? I didn’t see a model of it in the front.”
“We only display constructs that have passed the prototype stage.”
The tendrils of my magic slipped through Rahul’s defenses. Mental mages guarded against what they knew, especially their own brand of magic. Rahul built a shell around his mind, hiding his thoughts and protecting himself against a direct assault. He had expected a battering ram. But vines didn’t batter, they grew, and curved, and found purchase in the smallest crevices. They went over and around, and eventually they slithered in.
Cheryl tapped the keyboard of her laptop. A digital screen on the wall flared up, displaying a construct. It had a long, sharp head armored by a metal carapace followed by a segmented body, like that of a millipede, and ending in a powerful finned tail. It reminded me of some alien shrimp.
“The Kraken was twelve meters long from the tip of the head to the end of the longest appendage,” Cheryl said. “It could collapse its width to one and a half meters in circumference, but it reached maximum efficiency at a circumference of two meters.”
Thirty-nine feet long and six and a half feet in circumference. A monster.
The construct turned its head toward me. Metal slid aside, opening a huge maw lined with rows and rows of serrated metal teeth.
The tendrils of my magic touched Rahul’s mind. He didn’t feel it. I fed a little more power into it.
“It had several operating modes and could alter its shape.” Cheryl pressed a key. The construct re-formed itself. The body coiled under the head and released eight long, segmented, metal spider legs. A nightmare.
“Does it have self-replicating capabilities?”
Cheryl put her hand flat on the desk.
If it was a signal, Rahul missed it. He was staring at me, fascinated.
“Ms. Castellano?” I prompted.
“It has regenerative capabilities,” she said. “It can repair itself.”
“Can it build axillary extensions? For example, is it able to add tentacles to itself?”
Cheryl leaned back. “What you’re suggesting is called Saito’s Threshold, a point where a construct gains life. No animator mage has ever crossed it. It’s impossible the way attaining the speed of light is impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because we do not grant life to our creations. Only animation. Our constructs do not feel. They do not think in traditional terms. They follow a simple ‘if-then’ loop. When their environment meets a certain predetermined condition, they react to it. While it gives them an illusion of free will and rational thought, they are a step above a calculator. They do not reproduce, they do not alter their structure, and they are incapable of higher brain functions or mental magic like telepathy.”
I hadn’t mentioned telepathy. It wasn’t on the table until she placed it there.
“Can a construct be made telepathic?” I asked.
Cheryl arranged her face into the embodiment of patience. “No. As I said, constructs are incapable of independent magic implantation. We have the capability to make them self-repairing. For example, you may have seen the Crawler model in the outer room. It resembles a centipede with numerous appendages protruding from its back. Crawler XII, the latest model, carries spare arms. In the event that an appendage becomes inoperable, it can jettison it and install a replacement. But it cannot manufacture a new arm or modify its design.”
“So what do you think happened to the Kraken?”
Cheryl sighed. “Environmental hazards.”
I waited.
“When the construct is forcefully pulled apart, its magic will seek to reassemble it. However, magic has limits. The Kraken’s magic signature vanished while it was clearing a school of Razorscales. I believe that they pulled it apart and either consumed enough of it or dragged the pieces in so many different directions that the distance became too great for reassembly. We’ve used echolocation and metal detectors in an effort to find the debris field; however, the Pit is filled with metal debris.”
“I’m sure that was a nightmare,” Alessandro said. “At some point, even if you found it, trying to salvage it wouldn’t have been cost-effective.”
What was he on about? A custom-made construct, especially a prototype of that size, contained titanium alloys and PGM, platinum group metals: rhodium, iridium, palladium. The metal alone would be worth millions. They should have spent weeks trying to recover it, if only to see what went wrong.
“Indeed.” Cheryl looked back at me.
“Perhaps the two of you could enlighten me?” I asked.
“Please don’t feel bad. Alessandro—”
I really didn’t like the way she said his name.
“—and I have similar outlooks. We run corporations, we employ people, and we both recognize that the cost-benefit analysis is a factor. It’s harder for you to see the big picture, not through any fault of your own, of course, but simply because you lack the relevant experience.”
Translation: Alessandro and I are special, and you are stupid and dumb and poor. And yet, somehow, I’d managed to scrape enough brain cells together to not invest in a literal money pit.
“Thank you for your time,” I said and stood up.
Alessandro rose as well.
Rahul stepped forward. “Can I have your number?”
Cheryl pivoted to him, her face mortified. “Please, excuse him,” she said, stamping each word. “He must not be feeling well.”
Rahul raised his hand, blocking Cheryl. “I’d really like to see you again. I promise, I’m not creepy.”
Alessandro stepped between me and Rahul and gave Cheryl a dazzling smile. “We really need to be on our way. It was lovely seeing you.”
Alessandro put his hand on the small of my back and gently pushed me toward the door.
“Hey.” Rahul moved to follow.
“Not one step more,” Cheryl warned him.
We escaped into the reception area and then into the museum.
“Well, he has some explaining to do,” Alessandro murmured.
“Hold on.”
I turned left toward the most recent section of the museum, and surveyed the constructs marked with Cheryl’s name. Digger XXIII, Crawler XXI, Blossom V . . . Just as I thought.
“I’m done,” I told him. We turned and made our way to the elevators.
“Where to?” Alessandro asked when we got into Rhino.
“Home.”
It was late, I was tired, and I hadn’t eaten since this morning, when I stole a couple of Arabella’s “superhealthy vegan muffins.” She’d made them special a few days ago. My sister usually cooked only under duress, but for some reason she got obsessed with that recipe. I had tried pointing out that any muffin recipe that didn’t use dairy was vegan by default, and that the loads of chocolate chips and nuts she’d put into them didn’t make them healthy, but she stuffed a muffin into my mouth and told me to mind my own business.